His chief worry was that his eyes would pop out - and once
they almost did, rendering him blind for several days. But he survived,
and lived to be 89.

As Alex Boese illustrates in these
incredible-but-true stories, science can be a dangerous profession - what with
toxic chemicals, lethal bacteria, poisonous insects and dangerous
radiation.

Deadly: Why would someone deliberately allow themselves to be bitten by one?

He begins with experiments in electricity, back in the 18th
century, when the race was on to see who could deliver the biggest electric
shock.

Birds got frizzled first, using something called a Leyden jar. In 1750, when the future Founding Father of the U.S Benjamin Franklin,
during a bibulous party, accidentally touched the top of a fully-charged Leyden
jar, the shock almost killed him.

By the 1800s, a German physicist called
Wilhelm Ritter was systematically electrocuting every part of his body to test
the strengths of currents.

But not until 1903 - despite popular demand
and the electrocution of dogs, calves and horses - did people get round to
electrocuting an elephant. Topsy had killed two of his keepers, and was
led out to a scaffold over a lake in New York's Luna Park.

Converted into
an execution platform, it had copper electrodes snaking out to it that carried
the entire voltage for Coney Island. Grainy footage shows Topsy going
rigid and slowly toppling over in a shroud of smoke. Electricity had come into
its own.

The next stage was to domesticate lightning through a 'surge
generator', the brain-child of a brilliant, dwarfish, cigar-chewing showman
named Charles Steinmetz. Descendents of his machine are still in use in
industrial labs 90 years later. This is where Alex Boese's sheep come
in, though not for long.

Lightning kills more people than any other
natural disaster, and research was needed on why strikes killed some people and
not others. An Australian researcher built his own surge generator,
frizzled 30 or more sheep and confirmed what most of us know - that if you are
caught in an electric storm, the best advice is to crouch in the open with only
your shoes touching the ground.

Some of these weird tales may be
familiar: Pavlov's neurotic dogs, perhaps, or the nuclear bomb tests over Yucca
Flats in Nevada, or Lucy, the chimpanzee who was brought up to be
human.

But Boese, who has written a previous book called Elephants On
Acid, covers territory largely unknown to me. For example, it was news
to me that serious consideration was given by both superpowers to nukeing the
moon, yet the U.S. Defence Department apparently awarded research money for an
atomic-powered Battleship Orion to do just that.

When the model was shown
to President Kennedy he allegedly recoiled in horror.

The best pages of
Electric Sheep are those describing the astounding, often reckless, courage of
those scientists who risk their own lives to further research.

For
example, men (there aren't many women here) who ingest larval worms, using their
own bodies to learn more about their life-cycle.

Or how about the
British researcher Henry Head, who believed that researchers into pain should
have first-hand knowledge of its effects, so severed a nerve in his arm and
subjected himself to a battery of painful tests over four years to make a vital
discovery about the body's nerve pathways?

Toxin research is lethally
dangerous. What kind of masochist would subject himself to the fangs of a
black widow spider?

In 1922, Professor William Baerg, of Arkansas, let
himself be bitten for five seconds by one. Baerg suffered such
terrifying cramps and pains that he had to be rushed into hospital, where he
stayed, delirious, for three days more.

But the master of death-defying
experiments was a Cambridge physiologist, Sir Joseph Barcroft, who from 1918 to
the Thirties variously shut himself in a gas chamber filled with prussic acid
(the dog with him died), lived for six days in an atmosphere equivalent to
16,000ft until his body turned deep blue, and, in 1933, decided to freeze
himself.

He lay naked in an ice-cold room, and endured this until he felt
himself basking in glorious warmth. He was on the verge of fatal
hypothermia.

Boese's practised storytelling is as pleasurable as any book
largely devoted to other people's discomfort, especially when so much of it is
in a good cause.

It is perfect summertime reading - preferably with a
friend nearby who can be constantly interrupted with unsettling facts.